U.K. Sunnis condemn London suicide attacks

Asylum policies
“In terms of asylum, our policy is: If you are in fear of persecution, you are entitled to come here,” the minister said Sunday on British Broadcasting Corp. television. “Obviously, if you then seek to attack the very state that you come to, that gives rise to different questions.

“But I don’t think we have been ultraliberal. ... What we have got to do now is unify all the forces in our society, in particular in the Muslim community, against those people who are fundamentally at odds with our values.”

Chilling photo released
Meantime, British police released a chilling photograph of the four bombers trudging into a train station on the morning they detonated their explosives.

As the investigation into the bombings continued in Pakistan and Egypt, Scotland Yard detectives published the picture in a bid to jog memories and garner more information from the public about the men’s movements on the morning of the attacks.

The photograph, taken from closed-circuit TV footage, shows the men walking into a railway station in Luton, just north of London, to take a train to the capital.

The four are dressed casually and look relaxed, their hands in their pockets. Each carries a backpack thought to contain the bombs which tore through London’s transport system during  rush hour on July 7, killing 55 people.

7:21 a.m.
The time code on the picture shows it was taken at 7:21 a.m., 89 minutes before three of the bombs went off in quick succession at three subway stations. The fourth blast tore apart a double-decker bus nearly an hour later. Three of the bombers were young British Muslims of Pakistani origin, while the fourth was a Jamaican-born Briton. Two of them were teenagers, one was just 22 and the other was 30.

Pakistani security forces have arrested six men in connection with the bombings — the most recent in the eastern city of Lahore, where authorities held two men on suspicion of having links with one of the bombers, Shahzad Tanweer.

Tanweer had visited Faisalabad and Lahore during two trips to Pakistan over the last two years. Pakistani intelligence sources say that in 2003 he met a man later arrested for bombing a church in the capital, Islamabad.

Biochemist questioned in Egypt
In Egypt, police have arrested a British-trained biochemist, Magdy Mahmoud Mustafa el-Nashar, and are questioning him about the attacks.

But Egyptian Interior Minister Habib el-Adli has said el-Nashar was not a member of al-Qaida and that Western and Arab media had drawn hasty conclusions about the arrested man.

AFP-Getty Images Magdy el-Nashar

The 33-year-old Egyptian was a researcher at Leeds University in England, and police are carrying out extensive searches at his rented house in the city, which was home to three of the bombers.

Police say they have yet to establish beyond doubt that the bombers had intended to die in western Europe’s first suicide bombing, even if alternative theories seemed unlikely.

“We’ve never used the phrase 'suicide bombers’. We’ve always been aware that amongst the things we need to clarify is the notion these people intended to die as well as letting off a bomb,” a spokesman said on Saturday.

Some newspapers have suggested the bombers might have been duped into believing they had time to escape after planting the devices. The Sunday Telegraph said the men had bought return tickets from Luton to London and had even paid for a carpark ticket for the car they left at Luton station.

Police are looking for a support network of planners, bomb-makers and financiers behind the men. They expect to find clear links to al-Qaida, the militant Islamist network behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and other bombings from Indonesia to Iraq and from Africa to Spain.

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